New trainee in Headway!

On the 1st of January 2009 to the Philippines arrived new trainee. Her name is Karla and she is from Peru! She will be part of Headway Process Logics and her role is to be Business Consultant, she will be stating here for One year!

All of us are very excited to see fresh blood :P It is nice experience to welcome someone new to introduce everything and shared everything. Sometimes it is strange because you have someone of whom you should take care and you already have your life  but all in all it is nice experience.
I’m sure Karla soon will write something on the blog and shared her first impressions. Look forward new posts!

Cheers,
Dorota

New Year's in Hong Kong

Happy New Year to everyone! :)

One of the most attractive things of The Philippines is the feasibility to travel across Asia Pacific. So, in the previous posting we profiled Thailand. And now I will be profiling Hong Kong.

Some basic data about Hong Kong:

1) Population rate comparing to the total HK area.

2) Chinese heritage, very marked, people feeling proud of it, but at the same time very open for tourism and commerce.

3) Cantonese Chinese language, very unique and impossible to understand. As far as what I know, its more complicated to learn than Mandarin chinese; so people in a way feel prouder to have this unique language as an asset.

4) Free visa access - Man, this is real talk about globalization. You can enter the country with free-visa from 10 to 180 days depending on your country of residence.

It was an amazing time there, not only for meeting people in the consulting business, all talking about economic growth, business trends, China and opportunities with Latin America. But especially for meeting friends, walking around Koolon and having amazing fireworks in front of the IFC (International Finance Centre); this well remembered tower screened at The Dark Knight .

The funny thing was that we were photographed by a professional photographer who was taking pictures in the front line. Lucky us :) You can check out some more pictures here.

Other highlighs

Food. You can find food everywhere all day long. A nice thing to know, was that the goverment took all the street food and constructed like a food court, so that they could still sell their food but with higinical conditions and with tables and chairs to enjoy it as much as possible. It looked and tasted ok. And of course are plenty of spots to visit and unique flavors to try, I played it safe, though and had some noodles, I highly recomment them.

Ferry trip. You have to take it, its cheap and the view of Hong Kong is priceless.

Transportation. Very very neat.

Streets. Crowded - of course because of new year's eve; but also because people usually take off from work and walk the markets. Some avenues looked like Time Square in New York City. This city looks cosmopolitan and commercial at the same time; but commercial not only for the shopping sense (which was big), but also the high trade, the global business is in the air in Hong Kong. Which amazed me the most, was how safe it is. Really you feel secure.

Go to Hong Kong, either for business of placer, you will find it a great destination.

New Years in Thailand

For New Years Eve, there are two choices... stay in manila and watch some nice fireworks and drunken filipinos or go to Koh Pha-Ngan and party every night until 5am with 40,000 backpackers from all over the world!! 

Koh Pha-Ngan is a small island in the southern part of Thailand that I traveled to at the end of December.  The main attraction for this island is partying for sure.  Every night they party like it is New Years!!

There are fire dancers everywhere, fireworks exploding left and right, tons of drink stalls lining the beach, huge 6 foot speakers blasting out eclectic house music until 8 or 9 in the morning and of course, thousands of people. 

It is a really amazing experience that anyone who is in south east Asia needs to take up.  

There are a few funny things that needs to be noted.  1)  The lack of toilets is made up for with the thousands of people just pissing into the sea.  2) Fireworks are cheap.  Not only in price but in their manufacturing.  Lots of them are just exploding on the beach or only 10 meters above the beach making quite a show as drunk people dive for cover. 3) Thai guys really dress up well to look like girls... its frightening!!  4) One of the funniest displays is the fire jump rope where most of the people are just getting hit in the face with this rope thats on fire. 5) Taking the boat over to the island can be sickening!  half the people were puking because the boat rocked so much.  one of the worst experiences of the trip but I didn't puke... but listening to people puke for 4 hours is not fun.  

In Bangkok for my last day, I only had about 5 hours to tour around the city, eat and get a world famous thai massage.  So I power walked around to see about 5 wats... once you see two or three, you've seen them all.  I stopped taking pictures after awhile since it was all the same.  But below you can see a cool picture of some of the buildings in the Grand Palace.

The 350 Baht entrance fee is sort of a rip off but its still worth it to go in and see.  Tons of nice buildings, murals and buddha's to photograph.  The McDonalds in Thailand was not so impressive.  Quite slow service.  But the Thai food was unbelievable.  I definitely would rate that a 5 out of 5.  The red curry, green curry, whatever curry!! all extremely tasty.

Visit of national ballet and StarCity

Tatlong Kuwento Ni Lola Basyang - still do not know what exactly the title of the ballet means, but this ballet was something amazing. 3 different stories as performance of members of Filipino national ballet group.

3 main different things comparing to Europe ballet.
1. Dressing up - We, trainees, came dress up (as standards in Europe are dictating), but here, people just simply enjoy, do not bother too much with dressing up for ballet.

2. National anthem - sung prior to start...(together with listing all the sponsors of the event)

3. Story teller - "lola" - the old lady before every "ballet story" was explaining to the audience what is the next part going to be about. So people can really relax and not to think about what actaully was the story ballet was supposed to express...(on the another site people are not force to think so much and coming up with phantasy:). We actually could train our brains and think because stories were told in tagalog :).

StarCity

As actually the 4th different thing was all the attendees of ballet got free ticket to StarCity - place full of attractions, scare houses and shops with items for 10 PhP (= 1/4 of USD ;)).

Usually I love these kind of places - go and tickle your adrenalin...but StarCity was even more adventurous! As EU is not having its long hands in this country with all the restrictions and rules, the security standards, how to describe that, "are tickeling your adrenalin even more than needed". Basic chain and thats it...even 2 more guys would fit to one sit with me and there would be still some space to easily fall out! However amazing place to come...what was also funny about this place where in most cases "people do not feel so well after few rounds" - food stands! As Philippines are really "food adicted nation" I would honestly proclaim, imagine yourself on one of the "secure" attractions and smell all the food around...one would p... //--\\

Headway Yearend Party

Last Saturday, December 13 we had our Headway Yearend Party. That event was to summarize whole year, thank to employee for they contribution and of course to spend time together and enjoy. The event started around 7 pm when all of the guests gathered in Café Attivo, small restaurant near our office. We started with delicious dinner and even more delicious desert :) after making our stomachs full we started the program. Hosts of the evening were: Michelle (Accounting Assistance from HBS) and Justin (Business Consultant from HPL). On the beginning we had speeches of Mike and Flo, our Headquarter, later Noli, Tim and Akie (managers of Headway companies) shared their thoughts and gave wishes for next year.

After the official part we started games :)we had both team and individual games. I have to admit that I had a great fun to see all the people completing tasks and doing different funny things :) one of the games was: How good do you know your Manager?. Both managers and employees were asked few questions; the task was to answer in the same way without communication. HDI (Headway Dynamics) team become the winner, they know each other very well :) rest of the teams should spend more time with each other and get to know, integration meetings are recommended :P . We also had time to exchange gifts and we choose Best Look Girl and Boy of the evening, our winners were Flo and Jewel but she left earlier so we decided to give award to Ate Elsa :) Whole evening finished at 1 am and till the end we enjoy time together had a lot of nice moments and laugh. I think that idea of organizing such events is a great. We had chance to gather all employees and show how thankful we are that they are with us.

We as a Headway would like to wish you Happy Holidays and All the best for New Year!